Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (28 page)

The train was approaching faster than seemed possible. Why not, the sheriff thought, throwing mental hands into the air. It had been that kind of day. Now, just when it seemed like he might find a light at the end of his tunnel it turned out to be an onrushing train—or a tornado that sounded like one.

“What’s that noise, Dad?” Heather fastened her jeans as she reappeared at his side.

“Tornado, I think. We need to get off this floor, find shelter. And we need to get past a bunch of crazy people between us and the way down.”

He grabbed her hand and began leading her beside the belt, still rolling ever westward. There was a time that a single lightning strike inside the county would have shut down the power to everyone for hours. The sheriff was grateful for the technological improvements that had prevented a similar failure tonight. Somehow, that was why the windows had opened, and part of why they remained alive. Still, it would have been nice if whoever turned on the belt and opened the windows had taken the time to switch on the lights as well. All those open holes over gaping pits made this trip across the dark loading floor more of an adventure than he cared for.

The rain was falling outside all those windows more gently now, lightning exploded less often, and the bellowing thunder was diminishing and growing more distant. The moan from the approaching vortex was another matter. It was very close.

The wind was picking up again, not slashing this way and that as it had. Now it was coming straight through the north windows, gathering dust and grain and flinging it across the loading floor toward the opposite bank of glass. The sheriff was afraid he knew why. It was like a black hole had formed over there, drawing everything into it. As he watched, wisps of torn cloud began to stream through the north windows and rush across the floor like a crowd of misty ghosts hurrying, lemming like, toward the nearest drop. The sheriff recalled the movie
Twister
and wondered if he should expect the clouds to be followed by cows. Probably not, he decided, up here atop the elevator. The wisps became streams and their pace became frantic. It was a special effect the movie could have used—eerie, terrifying because of what it signified.

“Oh Daddy, look,” Heather shouted and the sheriff didn’t want to because he could hear the awed panic in her voice and he remembered how long it had been since she’d felt the need to call him Daddy.

It was just beyond the windows across the way, poised like some whirling viper hanging from a curdled sky. It coiled, its spinning jaws grinning at them as it searched the concrete wall for weakness, tasted the air for lives to swallow. The sheriff saw a pair of running figures hurrying toward it. The first was actually two, a giant carrying a smaller form above its head. The second was smaller and trailing, but bringing something bright and metallic in its hand.

The wind was an almost physical force that ripped at the sheriff and his daughter and demanded they follow it, go out and feed heaven’s serpent. The sheriff took hold of his daughter and pushed her down against the base of the nearest pillar.

“Grab it,” he shouted. “Lock your hands. Hold on with all your strength and don’t let go for anything.”

The sheriff couldn’t tell whether she heard him or simply obeyed out of an instinct for survival. He fumbled at his belt and found the 9 mm. The wind rocked him and wouldn’t let him steady himself but he couldn’t just let the one with the blade chase his brother into the waiting vortex. He aimed, squeezed, fired. A flash of blinding white lit the sky and showed him the whirlwind was growing impatient and had begun tearing steel window frames from their foundations as casually as a cruel child might pick the wings from a butterfly. It showed him, too, that his brother had disappeared, was suddenly and completely gone, leaving behind the bouncing, rolling form he had carried and a second, stumbling form at which the sheriff had just fired. Whether the one with the blade had been hit or affected by whatever had plucked Mad Dog out of thin air, the sheriff couldn’t tell and wasn’t given time to find out. A window exploded behind him, showering him with shards of broken glass and scraps of metal. Something huge and dark and tumbling slammed against his shoulder and knocked him under the belt, wedging him against its supports. A red mist rose up behind his eyes and claimed him and took him where even his daughter’s terrified screams couldn’t reach.

***

It was a tight fit, but Mad Dog’s body paint, along with the blood from his wounds and that of the being he was carrying, had proved a good lubricant. Mad Dog lost a little more skin on the way into the bin, but the extra weight of the form held above his head had been just enough to pop him through the opening like a cork shoved into a bottle. He’d been a little slow to realize what was happening, release his hold on the first evil, and grab for the lip of the hole as he descended through it. There’d been just enough time to see the one he’d dropped hit and roll and show surprising resiliency in springing back to its feet. And to watch as the second one slammed through the space Mad Dog would have occupied if there hadn’t been an opening to a grain bin at exactly this spot.

“That’s four,” Mad Dog had thought he heard as it sailed past and the first one somehow twisted to avoid its claw and instead got tangled with the second and the two of them spun a few steps closer to the windows. The sky serpent chose that moment to strike. One instant they were there, the next, they weren’t, and then Mad Dog felt the lip of the opening slip from his fingers as he began to plunge into seventy feet of emptiness. Yet what he felt wasn’t terror, but relief. The twin evils were gone, sucked off this plane of existence as suddenly and cleanly as Dorothy and Toto, hurled back into their spiritual prison until they might, somehow, sometime, find peace and harmony within themselves or encounter a spirit kind and powerful enough to heal them.

Mad Dog fell and heaven’s serpent reached for him, pulled the air from the empty container and, with it, Mad Dog, until his hands felt the rim again, grabbed it, and hung on. From outside, the wind blew across its mouth and produced a deep harmonic tone that vibrated like a massive pipe organ and shook Mad Dog like the reed of a colossal wind instrument. The wind and the serpent made a flute of the grain elevator. They played a brief song that Mad Dog had never heard before, and yet recognized. He would make himself a flute, he thought, and try to reproduce that melody.

If he lived.

Something had happened to his right hand. He could hardly feel his fingers anymore. It made keeping his grip that much harder, especially because the cut on his back had damaged some muscles and weakened his arm. Mad Dog, who could normally still manage twenty chin-ups, couldn’t do even one. More important, he wasn’t that confident of simply holding on either. He could feel the blood running down his legs and dripping into the pit. That blood was carrying his strength with it and, he sensed, there wasn’t that much left. He’d used it all, mentally and physically. He hung in the dark and silence and contemplated his mortality.

It had turned comparatively silent. The tornado had gone somewhere else now and the storm was going with it. There was still the rumble of distant thunder out there, still the steady fall of a gentler rain. The sounds penetrated the grain bin and echoed softly back from the distant floor.

If this was where he was going to die, Mad Dog thought, it wasn’t a bad place. Though this particular cavern stood above the ground, he thought it still qualified as a part of the World Below. That made this
Esceheman’s
place, Our Grandmother’s, and if his spiritual form was about to be separated from his physical one, he would be happy to trust his soul to her safe keeping. She would guide him to the place he was supposed to wait until he and the world were ready for another cycle. He felt himself slipping, his blood soaked fingers just didn’t have the strength. If they managed to find his body and get it out of here, he would have liked to tell someone to put his remains out on the plains, raised above them on a scaffold in the way his people had done it long ago. He would have liked to explain to Englishman what had happened here, and to the little historian from Fort Hays State. Over a rare steak and fries and a long cool beer at Bertha’s he decided, as the weight on his hands shifted, someone grasped his wrists, and a voice came echoing strangely from above, taking a long time to penetrate mental wanderings complicated by blood loss.

“Mad Dog, is that you?” the sheriff asked.

Mad Dog didn’t answer and Englishman spoke again. “I can’t think who else would be crazy enough to paint himself up like some Halloween skeleton and run around on top of a grain elevator in the middle of a thunderstorm, but I’m gonna be real upset if I pull you out of there and you turn out to be a psychotic murderer instead.”

“Hey, little brother,” Mad Dog said. “This round’s on me.” And then he didn’t remember anything for a while.

***

The sheriff’s legs were so weak that they would hardly hold him upright anymore. That’s what came of supporting more than two hundred pounds of makeshift-bandaged half-brother down a spiral metal staircase from the top of the Buffalo Springs grain elevator while your badly shaken preteen daughter lit the way with a failing flashlight. At least it had been down. And every step of the way had been accompanied by an explanation of the events of the day as seen by a recent but thorough convert to Cheyenne theology—versions physical and metaphysical. By the time he got to the bottom of those steps, the sheriff was almost tired and dizzy enough to believe it. He was also too exhausted to go for his truck, not that it mattered since Frenchy had finally arrived.

They went, lights-and-siren, back to the courthouse through a town that was surprisingly untouched by the furry of the storm as Mrs. Kraus filled him in on details over Frency’s radio from out of the ether and Mad Dog offered equally ethereal interpretations. There were some branches down and hail had shattered a few windows along Aspen in storefronts that were mostly abandoned anyway. A few more sheets of plywood weren’t going to make the street look much sadder and more forsaken than it already was.

The occasional street light still burned, as did flickering lights in the homes they passed. The sheriff glanced at his watch and was surprised that it was only a little after ten. He felt like the day had gone on forever, more like forty-eight or seventy-two hours than the eighteen he’d been up. Buffalo Springians were glued to their TVs watching the evening news, curious to see if somewhere else had been hit harder by the storm and whether tomorrow would bring more of the same. In Kansas, the local weather report was as riveting as global events like wars and revolutions. Even at the height of the cold war, a Kansan had felt more threatened by the weather than Soviet nuclear weapons. Take a year of the state’s weather damage and pile it in one place and the destruction was probably comparable to a missile strike. After the equivalent of one nuke a year, the sheriff decided, it wasn’t too surprising that the folks who stayed here were a pretty hardy and independent lot. And after listening to Mad Dog’s dissertation on shamanism and ancient evil, he decided, they were maybe a little peculiar, too.

Mrs. Kraus had told them that Doc and Judy were back at the courthouse with their collection of evidence. That was what made the courthouse their immediate destination. The sooner they got Mad Dog to Doc and received an evaluation of wounds and blood loss, the sooner they’d know whether they had to call in a medevac and get Mad Dog to whatever hospital in an adjoining county wasn’t socked in by the storm. From the way he continued raving, the sheriff thought things probably weren’t too serious. Most of it didn’t sound like Mad Dog was any more out of his head than usual.

The sheriff supposed they would find the bodies soon. Most likely tomorrow, though where was anyone’s guess. Tornados were funny that way. They might be dangling from power lines or the branches of a tree. They could have been slammed up against the side of a building or dumped into one of the nearby creeks. Most likely, though, they’d simply be cast aside from hundreds or thousands of feet above the endless plain and allowed to drift back to earth about as gently as if they’d stepped in front of a speeding grain truck and been turned into instant roadkill.

Mad Dog didn’t think they’d find bodies. He thought both their physical and spiritual forms had been plucked away from this existence and imprisoned “elsewhen or at some other where.” Time and space would be completely flexible for them now, according to his world view.

A quick glance down one of the cross streets convinced the sheriff that even the mobile homes—nah, what did they call them now (premanufactured or something)—even the half dozen or so of those that had sprung up on the west side were still firmly attached to their tie downs, trusting the next storm would be as gentle to them as this one. That they were still there, he supposed, was just one more Kansas miracle.

Mad Dog’s theology linked them, Ellen Lane and Ben Todd. To him, they were just two parts of the same madness, the Ketchums, perhaps, revisited. The sheriff could appreciate his opinion. The couple had obviously been linked by an ancient evil—the molestation of two children by those who were bigger and stronger and crueler. They’d been bound to the abuses of previous generations as well, and their tragic aftermath, and learned some sort of distorted need and loathing, each for the other. Still, the sheriff couldn’t help but wonder which of them had done the murders. There probably wasn’t going to be any way to tell now. From what Mrs. Kraus said, the KBI had remarkably little physical evidence to link anyone to their dead Simms. His own best clues, those footprints under the reverend’s fuse box and across the back yard, were gone by now, erased by the storm as surely as the couple themselves. The sheriff found he favored the woman because of the savagery of the vengeance that had been visited on her brothers and the comparatively gentle attentions to her father. On the basis of pure physical strength, and it had taken a lot of muscle to cram a pair of Simmses into a pair of public toilets, he had to think it was the man. Rage could raise a lot of adrenaline, though, or more than a decade of false imprisonment could inspire a really twisted and brutal retribution.